Information management is a big deal y'all

_posts/2023-01-19-eng-leadership-info-management.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "A lot of engineering management is actually information management"
+tags:
+- software
+- leadership
+- management
+- opinion
+---
+
+Are you an organized person? Do you understand information flow in your
+organization? The importance of categorization and taxonomy? You might be a good
+fit for Engineering Management! Having now spent a number of years in management
+and leadership positions, I have noticed a number of successful patterns, and
+unsuccessful patterns. In this post I want to focus on one of the more
+successful patterns: good information management.
+
+Engineering managers are expected to have loads of information ready in their
+at all times. The architecture of the systems their team is responsible for,
+current project priorities, cross-team points of dependence or collaboration,
+and a myriad of other snippets of information. It's a _lot_, but I don't think
+it's reasonable to expect a person to maintain so much information in their
+active memory. That's why information management is _very_ important for a
+management role, I don't need to _remember_ everything, but I do want to
+remember where everything is _documented_.
+
+Some of the productive patterns that I have seen and utilized:
+
+* **Decision Log**: it's great when a team can make decisions quickly, but an
+  inventory of decisions made is increasingly important as the team grows or
+  evolves over time. This should include a synopsis of the decision being made,
+  the alternatives considered, the trade-offs discussed between options, and
+  the reasoning behind the decision ultimately made.
+* **Link everything**: [Tim
+  Berners-Lee](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee) wants you to
+  hyperlink all your hypertext! Creating a meeting invite? Link to the meeting
+  notes page in the agenda. Creating a meeting notes page to discuss a project?
+  Link to the project in the issue tracker. Creating a ticket in the issue
+  tracker? Link to the decision made to implement that solution, or the
+  customer support ticket(s) it relates to, or the other projects that this
+  ticket blocks. Creating a commit to complete a ticket, link to the ticket in
+  the commit and pull request. Every link created is a breadcrumb for the
+  manager and the team to tap into this web of useful and related information.
+* **Research must produce documentation**: frequently a manager or engineer needs
+  to answer a question, that's it. "Can this technology be used to solve this
+  type of problem." That research work doesn't usually result in a direct code
+  or systems change to a production application, but the _output_ of that
+  research should be documentation in the wiki. In essence **every bit of work
+  in engineering should produce an artifact**. Most tasks will produce a pull
+  request, but research tasks should produce a document which outlines what was
+  learned, or create a new decision in the decision log. This allows the
+  manager to benefit and reference back to knowledge gained during a project
+  that did not lead to tangible code changes.
+* **Metadata is crucial**: At least in the Atlassian suite of tools there are a
+  myriad of ways to categorize pages and tickets. _Use them_. A good taxonomy
+  of labels can go a long way. In the case of documentation in the wiki, this
+  allows for creating aggregations of pages around a particular topic. These
+  aggregation pages can provide a quick overview for all resources relating to
+  a specific technology or project. In the issue tracker labels can provide a
+  useful point to query tickets relating to a point in the ticket lifecycle, a
+  project, or even a specific customer's needs.
+
+
+From my perspective it is not the project managers job to add the necessary
+links or information hierarchy, it is not even really the engineering managers
+job. It is however the managers job to build the culture of information
+management that allows them and the team to quickly recall or re-discover
+critical information about the projects that are being worked.
+
+
+Some managers I know use running Google Docs or Spreadsheets to manage their
+workload, which may work for personal task tracking, but I typically discourage
+their use. They're not linkable and discoverable enough!c Many spreadsheets are
+write-once and read-once. By building and collaborating with a shared
+information management scheme, the team and the managers can benefit from the
+on-going "gardening" of information.
+
+Regardless of the system you use or consider, if you are a manager, please
+consider that a large part of your job relies on managing _information_, and
+institute the practices and systems necessary!
+